Musings and Photos about Life and Real Estate Development in Post-Industrial Brooklyn and New York City

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

The Great Wallabout Chopstick Storage Collapse Mystery

Right up front: any tip we receive that talks about a storage facility collapsing due to the weight of 20,000 pounds of chopsticks is guaranteed to get our total attention. A big self-storage facility near the BQE in Wallabout that a number of evicted 475 Kent residents were using apparently suffered a partial structural collapse recently. Here is the email the came to our inbox about the StorageMart, which is on Wallabout Street near the Kent Avenue entrance to the BQE:

A lot of us who were evicted from 475 Kent stored belongings there and two weeks ago some part of the StorageMart apparently flooded and partially collapsed - the rumor is that it happened because there were 20,000 pounds of chopsticks stored in one of the units.

My former roommate has been trying for two weeks to get his stuff out but he has been told that the city has shut part of the complex down because of "flooding". If you walk around the building - you can't see what happened - it must be in the interior that the damage happened...There are a lot of other storage places down Flushing and I talked to some of them and they all have heard about it but don't want to talk about it.

Followers of the 475 Kent saga will recall that one of the major issues in the building was the illegal matzo bakery in the basement. And, now, they may have been victimized by ten tons of chopsticks? We already know that nothing will come along today that will amuse us more than the Great Wallabout StorageMart Chopstick Mystery.